Saturday, March 21, 2015

Today's important political news and opinion

Update

GOP Win

My 14-year-old granddaughter Britnye was one of two
"presidential candidates" who gave speeches to her 8th grade class.
She was the GOP candidate and took a conservative, almost libertarian line in
her speech on minimum wage, healthcare, gun control and taxes. Then they voted
and she won. Of course, this was not in Madison,
but in a rural town about 25 miles out. ~Bob

Excerpt: At the start of football season, the “Peanuts”
cartoon by Charles Shultz always had a strip where Lucy held a football for
Charlie Brown to kick. Charlie would run to the ball and at the last minute,
Lucy would pull the ball away and Charlie would fall. That particular series
went on for years with the same outcome each year. As a country, we are the
Charlie Brown and our adversaries today and in the past are Lucy. We continue
to believe that we can trust those who have consistently shown that they can
not be trusted. Unfortunately it is not a football that is pulled away from us
at the last minute, but something more important and menacing. it is our
security and freedom that is at stake. We made countless agreements and pacts
with the Soviet Union throughout the years
following World War II, and they cheated with each one. We hoped each time
that perhaps they had changed and would finally live up to the latest agreement
signed. That never happened. We continued to hope and believe that if we
treated them “nice’’ they would respond in kind. that also never happened
because they viewed our actions as weakness to be taken advantage of. (Some
people will not learn until they are stood against a wall to be shot. Their
last words will be, "Why didn't somebody do something?" ~Bob)

Excerpt: Why do our “best and brightest” fail when faced
with a man like Putin? Or with charismatic fanatics? Or Iranian negotiators?
Why do they misread our enemies so consistently, from Hitler and Stalin to Abu
Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliph? The answer is
straightforward: Social insularity: Our leaders know fellow insiders around the
world; our enemies know everyone else. The mandarin’s distaste for physicality:
We are led through blood-smeared times by those who’ve never suffered a bloody
nose. And last but not least, bad educations in our very best schools: Our
leadership has been educated in chaste political theory, while our enemies
know, firsthand, the stuff of life.

Excerpt: If you believe Hillary Clinton, her email scandal
happened because she couldn’t figure out how to do what every American of
working age knows how to do; juggle a work and personal email account. The Clinton
vaporware bridge to the 21st century turned out to be a private email server
that kept out the media, but not foreign spy agencies. When Hillary finally had
to turn over some emails, she printed out tens of thousands of pages of them as
if this were still the 20th century. But like the rest of her party, Hillary is
very much a 20th century regulator, not a 21st century innovator. (Very nice
article, explaining something about today's Democrats. The Party leadership is
mostly high IQ intellectuals, ideologues, and they aren't engineers,
physicists, practical scientists or technologists. Their worldview is
specialized, and only thinks of science as something to use to help implement
their great plans for society. And yes, that doesn't matter to them, because,
after all, they KNOW they are the smart people who are best able to take care
of the rest of us. --Del)

Operation Jade Helm-
Military trains for Martial Law in American South-West

Excerpt: A couple months ago the DHS (Department of Homeland
Security) and FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) stated that the number one
threat to the United States
is none other than its own citizenry. This isn’t some small group of spun out
nuts or even groups of people that the government feels are too religious such
as WacoTexas
and The Branch Davidians. As far as Islam, they were not even mentioned in the
report. Instead, huge swaths of American culture and people were listed as the
most likely threat to our country.

Excerpt: She made a pledge to
publish all the donors on an annual basis to ease concerns that as secretary of
state she could be vulnerable to accusations of foreign influence...in a breach
of the pledge, the charity's flagship health program, which spends more than
all of the other foundation initiatives put together, stopped making the annual
disclosure in 2010, Reuters has found. (...) The finding could renew scrutiny
of Clinton's
promises of transparency as she prepares to launch her widely expected bid for
the White House in the coming weeks. Political opponents and transparency
groups have criticized her in recent weeks for her decision first to use a
private email address while she was secretary of state and then to delete
thousands of emails she labeled private. (This "scandal in a teacup"
may not be over yet. It also explains why the White House is so irritated they
are throwing leaks at the media to make HRC's life difficult. This article
is from Reuters via AOL News, neither exactly bastions of conservative thought.
Many liberals around here are deeply concerned, no, not concerned enough
to vote for a Republican, but still.... On the other hand, AOL positioned it as
#39 of 40 stories at 11PM EDT. Ron P.)

Excerpt: Jim Messina, the co-chair of Hillary
Clinton’s super PAC and former White House Deputy Chief of Staff for
President Barack Obama, is earning “tens of millions” of dollars as
“Silicon Valley’s go-to government fixer” in Washington. Messina is also famous as the White
House staffer who told Democrats to “punch back twice as hard” in
town hall meetings on Obamacare in 2009, and as the campaign manager for
President Obama’s negatively-themed re-election in 2012. Currently, Messina works for
companies like Uber and Airbandb, selling his connections in the Obama
administration for a hefty price. (To cite Robert Bolt: “For Wales?
Why Richard, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. . .
but for Wales!” ― Robert
Bolt, A Man for All Seasons. --Barb)

Worth Reading:
Blame parents for those narcissist kids. New
research reveals the roots of inflated egos -- and why they're dangerous. By Mary Elizabeth
Williams

Excerpt: New research this week in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences found that children whose parents describe them
as “more
special than other children” and “deserving something extra in life” were
– shocker – more likely to score higher on tests of narcissism than children
whose parents described them differently. The year and a half long
Netherlands-based study looked at 565 children aged between seven and twelve,
and their parents. And as OhioStateUniversity
communications and psychology professor Brad Bushman explains, the danger in
raising kids to believe they’re more special and deserving is that there’s a
strong correlation between narcissism and bad behavior. (The roots of the
entitlement generation. As I have said on this blog before, if you want to
destroy your kids, give them lots of un-earned self esteem. ~Bob)

Welfare: The Obama Recovery. 33% of Americans out of
workforce, highest rate since 1978

Excerpt: The number of Americans aged 16 and older not
participating in the labor force hit 92,898,000 in February, tying December’s
record, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). ...
To
put it another way, when President Obama took office in January 2009, there
were 80,529,000 Americans who were not participating in the workforce, which
means that 12,369,000 US
citizens have left the workforce since then.

Excerpt: A brave rape survivor took the podium at a Maryland state Senate
meeting this week and told the frightening tale about being stalked by a man
she never met. Jacqueline Kahn was speaking in support of a measure that would
allow residents in Maryland
to carry concealed weapons for self-defense. The state is currently one of
just a handful in the nation that doesn't allow residents to carry firearms on
the basis of protection alone.

Excerpt: The president was playing fast and loose with his
language here—to a group of college students no less. There’s little excuse for
the claim that in some neighborhoods, it is easier to buy a gun than vegetable
(see update above) — or to say he’s “not exaggerating” when he claims that some
people have proposed laws that would allow machine guns in bars. As for
the U.S. ranking on
homicides among industrialized nations, the president certainly would have had
a stronger case if he said the United
States was above average, or that it was in
the top ranks. But instead he claimed the United States had rates that were
higher “by like a mile.” The gun debate is serious enough that it should not be
poisoned by exaggerated claims and faux statistics. The president earns Three Pinocchios.

Excerpt: The director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
Firearms and Explosives resigned suddenly on Friday while the agency
is still reeling from its failed “backdoor ammo ban” of the popular 5.56 M855
bullet. It is unclear if B. Todd Jones’ departure is at all related to that
proposed ban..... With backing from the Obama administration, ATF sought
to prohibit the sale of the M855 — the so-called “green tip” — out of fear that
they pose a risk to police officers since they can pierce bullet-proof
vests.

Business Rewards
Monthly Bonuses To Concealed Carry Employees, “It’s a good thing for society and
if I can encourage it I think it’s kind of my duty to do that”

Excerpt: A law office in Iowa is rewarding staff members who tote
guns to work with a monthly $50 bonus. As a registered NRA instructor, Davenport attorney Eric
Puryear says he wanted a way to combine his law practice and his passion for
the Second Amendment.

Excerpt: Andrea Grimes, senior political reporter at the
lefty women’s site RH
Reality Check, sank to a disgusting new low Thursday by saying
that guns should be confiscated only from white men. “Suggestion: we don’t have
to vaporize all the guns. Let’s just vaporize white men’s guns,” Grimes tweeted, linking to an article about Arizona shooter Ryan Giroux.

Excerpt: The robber stopped near the door - like he was
looking inside the billfold – then, all of a sudden, he took off running. We
asked what scared the man off, Jandebeur said, "I pulled out my automatic
and was getting ready to ventilate him."

Excerpt: Officials said they don’t know what suspect Richard
White intended to do with the homemade bombs or what triggered the incident.
(We need to make airports Machete and Molotov Cocktail Free Zones. That'll
solve the problem. ~Bob)

Excerpt: A Florida sheriff is citing “stand your ground” in
his decision not to charge a disabled Army veteran with a crime after he shot
two homeless men while helping a pregnant woman being assaulted.

Excerpt: Each and every time we’re hectored to engage in an
“honest conversation” about race, it’s a sham. What’s wanted is not honesty,
but confession of sin by white people and expressions of pain from blacks and
others. Decade after decade, despite vastly diminishing levels of white racism
(and the rapid growth of non-white populations), we are told that the old stain
of racism continues to poison the lives of minorities. By encouraging that
fiction, Starbucks is subtracting from racial understanding.( I think it's an
honest and not really unfair comment by this lady, about things in this
country, about how the great majority of decent, White middle and upper class
people feel. The push, however subtle, for Whites to feel guilt about slavery
and discrimination has gone on so long and is so constant in the media and
public commentary that it's really worn people out. Seeing the term
"racist" thrown around so fast, so often, has gotten a lot of people
tired of it, even though all of us know very well that there is still White
racsim, and most of us also recognize there is Black racism as well. There's no
point in arguing which group is the larger, the existence of both is
unfortunate and counterproductive for all of us. And at times, the harping
about racism ends up with one of the "unforeseen consequences", which
is the increase of racial tension and a widening of racial divide. I don't
suggest we all put on blinders and pretend there wasn't slavery, nor
discrimination, nor that there isn't still some racism and some discrimination.
But focusing on it so tightly, so constantly, and going with the instant assumption
that every Black man shot by a cop was a racist murder, and that the rage and
frustration of the Black community justify burning and looting, is not helping
any steps forward, it keeps us moving backward. What we need is a lot more
concentration of getting along (Rodney King was very right) and a very great
deal less of jumping to conclusions. Part of the formula for getting over racism
is to just get along and focus on positives more than negatives. And we need
leaders of all colors to work towards that. --Del)

Perhaps time to pass this on again:Essay: Racism in America. By Robert A. Hall

Excerpt: Fifty years ago this month, Democrats made a
historic mistake. ... “The fundamental problem,” Moynihan wrote, is family
breakdown. In
a follow-up, he explained: “From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century
Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one
unmistakable lesson in American history: a community that allows large numbers
of young men to grow up in broken families ... never acquiring any stable
relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational
expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos.” Liberals
brutally denounced Moynihan as a racist.

Excerpt: The Army is
investigating a platoon of soldiers in Alaska
reportedly given a free pass to use racial slurs against each other in what was
known as "Racial Thursdays.". ... "When I first got to my unit,
someone said we should do 'Racial Thursdays' because it's been a
tradition," said the soldier, who asked to remain anonymous. "It's
something they made up where you can say any racist remark you want without any
consequences. The platoon sergeant said no, but [it's] still going on."

‘That’s Not Racist,
You Idiot': Jay Leno Slams PC Intern for Labeling Him ‘Racist’ for Not Liking
Mexican Food

Excerpt: The 64-year-old comedian, who has been performing
college shows around the country, described how the youngster told him he was
‘racist’ when he said he didn’t like Mexican food.. (Video - watch some at the
end. --JB)

Excerpt: The Obama administration says more than 16 million
have gained insurance, thanks to ObamaCare. But a closer look at the numbers
shows they're once again playing fast and loose with the data. (Interesting...
my kids and most of their friends all say they pay little to no attention to
anything that comes from regular news channels, they expect it all to be silly,
vapid, manipulated, and at least inaccurate, more often just false. Apparently
all the generations from the 80s on see things mostly this way. How can I blame
them? They have it right, you have to look hard and carefully to find reporting
that is reasonably truthful and not heavily slanted. The joyful reports from
the news just today about how ObamaCare has brought insurance to so many
millions of people who never had it before are as good an example as anything. There
is some truth there, but so much of the numbers can be explained by other
factors that it becomes much harder to proclaim ObamaCare as a fantastic
solution to a terrible problem. And the cost is much higher than promised (so
hard to believe, isn't it?) overall, and a whole bunch of people the media
don't want to talk about are paying more money for less insurance than they had
before. If it weren't for the subsidies, which all of us taxpayers are footing
the bill for, many of those recently insured people still would not have been
able to get insurance. As the article winds up, there had to be other ways to
work on health care that would be more efficient than those 2700 pages have
turned out to be. --Del)

"You're Greener than Gore" News

The War on the Poor: Obama
administration tightens federal rules on oil and gas fracking. By Joby Warrick

Excerpt: The Obama administration imposed
tougher restrictions Friday on tens of thousands of fossil-fuel wells
on public lands that use fracking technology to extract oil and gas, saying the
measures would help safeguard the nation’s water supply. (Anything to raise
energy costs--the Democrats War on the Poor. ~Bob)

Excerpt: A new scientific paper has driven yet another nail
into the coffin of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. (H/T
Bishop Hill) The paper – Rethinking
the lower bound on aerosol radiative forcing by Bjorn Stevens of the
Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, published in the
American Meteorological Society journal – finds that the effects of aerosols on
climate are much smaller than those in almost all the computer models used by
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Aerosols are the minute
particles added to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels (as well as by
non-anthropogenic sources, like volcanoes). The reason they are important is that
they are so often cited by alarmists to excuse the awkward fact that the world
has stubbornly failed to warm at the disastrous rate they predicted it would.

Excerpt: On Thursday, the press announced that the Obama
administration would fully consider abandoning Israel in international bodies like
the United Nations. According to reports, President Obama finally called Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to congratulate him – but the “congratulations” was
actually a lecture directed at forcing Netanyahu to surrender to the terrorist
Palestinian regime. For some odd reason, many in the media and Congress reacted
with surprise to Obama’s supposedly sudden turn on Israel. The media, in an attempt to
defend Obama’s radicalism, pretend that Netanyahu’s comments in the late stages
of his campaign prompted Obama’s anti-Israel action.

Excerpt: There is only one problem: Netanyahu never said
that a Palestinian state was out of the question. The interview in which
Netanyahu expressed the much-misinterpreted remark took place with the
conservative Israeli publication NRG. It also took place in Hebrew, a language
virtually none of the members of the Western press read or speak; most simply
took the Ha’aretz report and ran with it. Netanyahu was asked directly
about whether his Bar-Ilan speech was “irrelevant.” ... In other words,
Netanyahu did not discount the possibility of a Palestinian state forever.
He said that anyone who tries to build a Palestinian state “hayom” – “today” –
would be giving territory to radical Islam. He even added that this was a
reality created in recent years. (Really doesn't matter. Neither Fatah nor Hamas
would sign a two state agreement allowing Israel to live. ~Bob)

Top violator of women's rights around the world? It's Israel says UN.
By Anne Bayefsky

Well Israel
doesn't allow women to vote or drive or serve in the armed forced, allows men
to divorce them with a word. Allows polygamy. Limits or forbids them to have
jobs. Requires them to wear religiously prescribed garb. And stones women
accused of adultery, including rape if they don't have four male witnesses. Oh,
wait, those are Muslim countries that do that. Israel
is the only country in the Middle East with
any kind of equality of women. Google "Stoning." ~Bob. See: Iran amends law on stoning for adultery. http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2013/05/30/Iran-amends-law-on-stoning-for-adultery-.html
Excerpt: Women are buried up to the their shoulders, but men only up to their
waists. They are spared if they manage to free themselves before dying. ... At
least 150 people may have been stoned in Iran since 1980, the International
Committees against Execution and Stoning said in 2010.)

Excerpt: “This settlement was always discriminated against,
and no one would recognize us as an official settlement. ... Bibi Netanyahu
himself and the Likud government finally recognized us,” Naim explained. “In
our heritage, we remember the good things a person did for us, and that
explains this unusual vote.”

Excerpt: He did promise to “fundamentally transform” our
nation, didn’t he? I wonder if this was the “change” that liberals were hoping
for when they first bought into Obama’s worthless drivel back in 2008.

Sen. Tom Cotton
pledges that he and the Senate will protect Israel in the UN and the ICC

Excerpt: Nuclear negotiations came to a halt Friday as Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, Iran’s
supreme leader, demanded to see President Obama’s long-form birth certificate
before continuing discussions. Khamenei’s decision came after a letter sent by
47 Senate Republicans revealed that any deal signed with the President would be
null and void because of a law requiring that he be born in the United States.
The letter, signed by the entire Republican leadership, expressed concern that
Khamenei may trust Obama simply because they are both Arabs.

Excerpt: Egypt's
President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi continues to reach out to America for
help in rallying the forces of good against a rising tide of evil—the
ever-spreading virus of militant Islam. And so far we are still snubbing him. As
I have written before in this space, Sisi appears to be a surprising successor
to the heroic British leader who first rallied his own people, then appealed to
the New World to join not only his, but humanity's, cause against the Nazi
menace—which is in many ways similar to the Islamist one today. Despite America's declared need for strong Arab allies
in the war against ISIS, which Sisi is already fighting in the northern Sinai,
and has even bombed in Libya,
our own government's commitment is still pending. (Short answer: Obama's more
likely to support Sen. Tom Cotton for president. ~Bob)

Excerpt: Three fresh examples: YEMEN, a country President
Obama touted as a foreign policy "success" story in 2014,
whose US-supported government has since been
overthrown by rebels backed by...the country with whom we're
currently negotiating a bad nuclear deal:

Excerpt: Gunmen who shot dead 21 people at Tunisia’s BardoMuseum
were also armed with explosive suicide belts and would have killed many more
had police not reacted so quickly to the attack, the country’s president said
last night. In an Independence Day television address, President Beji Caid
Essebsi described the carnage as a “great disaster” but said it could have been
much worse. (They wanted to
present as many dead bodies as possible to their bloodthirsty god. --Robert Spencer, JihadWatch.org)

Obama's War: U.S.
fears Islamic State is making serious inroads in Libya

Excerpt: The United States
is increasingly concerned about the growing presence and influence of the
Syria-based Islamic State movement in Libya, according to U.S. officials
and a State Department report. The officials said what they called
"senior" Islamic State leaders had traveled to the country, which is
whacked by civil war, to help recruit and organize militants, particularly in
the cities of Derna and Sirte. (Libya
under Gadhafi was quiet, but Obama led-from-behind a war not authorized by
Congress to change it into a violent, terrorist hell hole. ~Bob)

Excerpt: President Obama sent out his annual Nowruz (Persian
New Year) message on Thursday, hoping to “speak directly” to the “leaders”
of Iran in
a highly politicized message meant to garner support for an upcoming nuclear
deal with the Islamic Republic. In the video, the President mischaracterizes
the reality of Iran’s
political system, while trashing dissenters of his upcoming nuclear deal
with Iran.
He even finds time to praise Iran’s
dictator for his supposed fatwa against nuclear weapons–and speaks of Iran’s
“leaders” as if the despotic regime is governed by a legitimate parliamentary
democracy.

Excerpt: The Islamic State's attacks on Houthi civilians are
part of a deliberate strategy. AQAP tries to avoid such operations, but the
permissibility of deliberately killing Shiite civilians is still debated in
jihadist circles.

Boko Haram fighters
slaughter dozens of their 'wives' who had been kidnapped and forced to marry
them because they feared they would be freed and marry 'infidels'

Excerpt: Dozens of Nigerian women who were forced to marry
Boko Haram fighters were reportedly slaughtered by their 'husbands' before a
battle with troops in the northeast town of Bama. Witnesses said the Islamist militants
feared they would be killed by advancing soldiers or separated from their wives
when they fled the town. They killed the women to prevent them from
subsequently marrying soldiers or other so-called non-believers, they said.